Issues with Georgia voter information website raise concerns for November general election

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – A glitch in Georgia’s voter information page that lasted just shy of an hour during Tuesday’s primary election has some advocates concerned for the November general election.

The My Voter Page, referred to as MVP, is a site run by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office that allows voters to look up their registration status and precinct location, and track their absentee ballots and view sample ballots.

But for about an hour between 1-2 p.m. during Tuesday’s primary, the site was down, leaving voters with no access to their information.

“In the years I’ve been doing this I’ve never seen it be down for this long,” said Stephanie Ali, policy director with the voting rights group New Georgia Project. “So we have to have our confidence that this is getting fixed, that this is going to be stronger and that this is going to handle a higher volume going into November and frankly beyond.”

Election officials said the crash was a symptom of too much traffic on the page – or more accurately – what those users were doing.

“It’s not just the user, it’s the things they’re requesting,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, in a press conference moments after the site went back online. “When you’re requesting to download a sample ballot, it’s a lot more capacity than it is if you’re just looking at your polling location, so it’s not a question of number of users. We were in the thousands at a time of doing it at that point.”

But primary elections historically see far lower voter turnout than general elections, so the concern is that the site will experience something similar when far more voters are using it in November.

“If this number of voters knocks it off its pedestal, then we’ve got to expect a higher number are coming and we’ve got to be ready for that,” said Ali.

Exacerbating the issue were ongoing delays at U.S. Postal Offices in Georgia. Because those delays risked the timely delivery of absentee ballots, absentee voters were specifically encouraged to check the MVP for the status of their ballot, and if it wasn’t showing a confirmed delivery, they were directed to vote in person so their absentee ballot could be spoiled once it arrived late.

The page was needed Tuesday perhaps more than it had been in a long time. This year’s primary election was the first since a sweeping round of redistricting impacted the voting precincts and candidates for people in metro Atlanta and the metro Macon area.

It also happened in the middle of the day, when people still had a chance to confirm their precinct and go vote.

Ali said it could have been far worse.

“Our biggest fear seeing something like that is that that sort of crash happens in the evening at 6 p.m. when people are trying to do their final runs and there is no later,” she said. “You can’t just have a flippant response that, oh, there’s still a chance, because at some point there won’t be.”

The site was back up and running around 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Georgia saw a roughly 20% voter turnout for the primary.

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